Kathleen Parker commentary: Health law is unraveling with each improvisation

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Tuesday November 19, 2013 5:47 AM

Let’s recap: If you like your insurance policy, you can keep it. No, wait. If you liked your
policy, it was probably worthless anyway. Scratch that. If your junk policy was canceled and you
still want it, you can keep it.

Whatever.

So now President Obama has apologized for real. On Thursday, he told Americans, “I hear you loud
and clear” and announced that insurance companies can ignore the law for a year. The several
million Americans whose policies were canceled can keep them — or get them back — assuming state
regulators and insurance companies comply.

It isn’t clear whether insurers can, or will, based on the assurances of someone whose
credibility isn’t exactly soaring. Meanwhile, the newest promise dovetails with another earlier
delay granted to businesses with at least 50 employees, which were given another year to comply
with the ACA.

With the computer-crash rollout preventing people from signing up, businesses temporarily
exempted from compliance, and policyholders either reinstated or facing yet another broken promise,
is there anyone left to love Obamacare?

In the wake of Obama’s latest tweak, two salient questions have emerged: Can the ACA survive?
Can the president even do what he just did, legally?

Though brilliant minds may differ, the president probably is within bounds, according to a
compelling argument by Simon Lazarus, senior counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center.
The relevant constitutional text, he writes on
The Atlantic’s website, requires that the president “take care that the laws be faithfully
executed,” a broad-enough concept to allow for judgment in the execution.

In part, Obama is trying to pre-empt a new House bill to aid canceled policyholders that passed
Friday with bipartisan support. Cynics on the left insist that Republicans have no real interest in
helping Obamacare. And, of course, they are correct. Do Republicans just want to make sure Obama
fails? Yes, but not for reasons sometimes suggested. Racism is not the reason half the country
opposes Obamacare and many more now doubt its efficacy.

Similarly, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky notoriously said that his job
was to make sure Obama was a one-term president, it wasn’t because of race nor was it immediate to
the president’s election. McConnell made his remark in October 2010 on the eve of the midterm
elections and after Obamacare passed without a single Republican vote.

In other words, Republicans oppose Obama’s policies, not the man, because they believe that
nothing less than individual freedom is at stake. Under present circumstances, this hardly seems
delusional.

Finally, Democrats incessantly seize upon their prize trophy: The U.S. Supreme Court validated
Obamacare. True-ish. The high court didn’t endorse Obamacare as a good idea. It didn’t even find
the individual mandate constitutional. It ruled that the mandate/penalty is constitutional only
if the penalty is viewed as a “tax.”

Whether the ACA survives the new timetable remains an open question. The plan sinks or swims on
the basis of young, healthy people signing up, which, for now, they cannot do except in dribs and
drabs. Further, the ACA clearly needed the canceled policyholders to buy new, more-expensive
policies to underwrite subsidies and pre-existing conditions.

Given the season, the timing of these un-glad tidings could not be worse. Soon enough, Americans
will figure out whether Obamacare is the gift Democrats promised — or if Obama is the Grinch who
stole, you know, the holiday season.